Safe, and unremarkably so, which is the answer most people are actually hoping for. The recorded crime rate lands within a couple of percent of the surrounding district. The whole village records a double-digit number of crimes across a full year. Nothing in the figures singles Lifton out in either direction. It is not a place with a crime story, and the absence of one is the story.
Police.uk records 81 crimes in the area in the year to May 2026, which works out at a published rate of around 46 crimes per thousand people. Both of those are published figures on their own bases, and the rate is not the count divided by the village population: the two use different population definitions, and treating them as the same thing produces a number that is wrong in an authoritative-sounding way. Eighty-one incidents over twelve months is the scale of the thing.
For comparison, the West Devon rate over the same period runs at around 47 per thousand. Lifton's is around 46. That is a difference of about 2%, which in a place of this size is well inside the range that one unusual month would move. The village is neither the quiet corner of the district nor the noisy one. It is the district, expressed in miniature.
The texture behind those numbers is what you would expect of a settlement scattered across farmland. Population density averages around 573 people per square kilometre, unemployment sits at about 2%, and around 2% of households count as overcrowded. Those are descriptions of the place rather than explanations of the crime figure, but they tell you what kind of area is producing it: settled, low-density, with very little of the housing pressure that shapes life in the bigger towns.
Worth separating out, because people conflate the two constantly, is what happens after somebody reports something. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in around 8% of cases over the year to May 2026, against around 12% nationally, and closed around 26% of cases with no suspect identified at all. Among the 42 police forces in England and Wales, this one ranks 42nd on that charge rate. None of that makes Lifton less safe, because charging decisions are made across an area covering two counties and carry no signal about any particular village. It does answer the question people actually mean when they ask whether somewhere is safe, which is usually less about the odds of it happening and more about whether anyone does anything afterwards. On current form, the honest answer is that reporting a crime here is more likely to produce a record than a resolution.
Safety in Lifton is the middle of the road, and the middle of the road in rural West Devon is a quiet place to stand. The crime rate will not be the reason anyone moves here, and it will not be the reason anyone leaves.